Lazada, Alibaba’s Southeast Asia e-commerce business, gets a new CEO

Alibaba has reshuffled the leadership at Lazada, its e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, after CEO Lucy Peng — an original Alibaba co-founder — stepped down to be replaced by Lazada executive president Pierre Poignant after just nine months in the role.

That last investment saw Peng, formerly executive chairman of Ant Financial, become Lazada CEO in place of Max Bittner, who had been installed by former owner Rocket Internet back in 2012. Poignant also arrived at the company in 2012 and worked alongside Bittner as Lazada’s COO. Since then, he has been head of its logistics division before a brief five-month stint as executive president prior to this new role.

Peng will remain involved in the Lazada business as its executive chairwoman, the company said.

Lazada operates in six countries across Southeast Asia, but there are very few indicators of how the business is performing.

Lazada took part in the recent 11/11 Singles’ Day sale mega day. Alibaba as a whole grossed $31 billion in GMV during the 24-hour period but the company did not break out numbers for Lazada. Lazada itself said it broke records, but the only data it provided was that 20 million shoppers were “browsing and grabbing” deals on its site — you’ll note that statement doesn’t explicitly provide sales. We did ask at the time, but Lazada declined to give sales or revenue numbers.

Against that backdrop, it is hard to say whether Peng was brought in as a stop-gap while Lazada searched for a new CEO, or whether her original remit was to preside over a revamp of the business. Lazada has certainly gone about installing new executive teams in many local markets, according to sources within the company, but it isn’t clear whether Peng is moving as planned or whether things didn’t work out as expected.

Speaking on the rivalry, Tokopedia CEO William Tanuwijaya told TechCrunch that he sees differences between the two.

“We see Lazada having a different business model than us: Lazada is a hybrid of retail and marketplace model, whereas Tokopedia is a pure marketplace. Lazada is [a] regional player, we are a national player in Indonesia,” he said.

Note, 12/16 04:30 PST: The original version of this article has been updated with additional information around Lucy Peng’s new role.